Unique and Powerful Animation Features Added to Character Animator CC

Working directly with experienced and aspiring animators, coupled with extensive research and development, Adobe has created a new approach to animation. Character Animator, now officially out of Beta, is a unique and powerful application for intuitive 2D character animation. Create characters in Adobe Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC and bring them to life by acting out your movements and recording your voice using your webcam and microphone. Character Animator will track your facial expressions and motions in real time.

Having captured the hearts of not only animators who wish to go live with their characters (as seen on The Late Show or The Simpsons), Character Animator also offers designers a simple way to animate their static characters. The latest update to Character Animator further simplifies the animation process while giving artists the flexibility they need to deliver expressive, high-quality animations.

New Ways to Animate: Trigger Behavior and Panel, a Control Panel, and Pose-to-Pose Animation

Trigger artwork with easier setup of custom-named triggers that can reference layers in different groups. These named triggers are listed in the Triggers panel, where you can assign a key to a trigger, view the list of layers controlled by a trigger, and even associate a MIDI note to trigger artwork using a connected MIDI device. The new Controls panel helps you pose and animate your characters like never before.

Automatically create stylized animation with a pose-to-pose look from your live performances. Characters can smoothly transition from one held position to another, giving a hand-animated look to both live and recorded performances.

Tracked pupil movement for a puppet now darts to nine common positions (up, down, left, right, four corners, and straight ahead) by default and you can control eye darting with the arrow keys or by dragging on a touch-enabled display. Eyebrows can tilt as you raise or lower them for more expressiveness, such as tilting inward at the low point to accentuate a scowl, or tilting outward at the high point to enhance a surprised look.

New Behaviors: Collision Physics, Layer Picker, and Fader Behaviors

In Character Animator, control a puppet through the behaviors that are applied to it. Face tracking is an example of a behavior, and so is the automatic wiggling of vectored artwork. The Layer Picker behavior gives you new ways to trigger a specific layer or sequence of layers in a puppet or group. The Fader behavior allows you to show or hide a specific part of a puppet by fading the opacity of that part over time.

Audio Waveforms and Roundtrip Support with Adobe Audition

Get a visual representation of audio amplitude with a new audio waveform display. Waveforms now appear on audio tracks to help adjust the timing of a puppet’s entrance on a scene as well as the takes and the visemes. Edit your audio with the full power of Audition and immediately see the changes in Character Animator after saving.

Lip Syncing Improvements

A new lip-sync algorithm powered by Adobe Sensei more accurately picks the right mouth shapes to correspond with spoken sounds. Automatic lip-sync data created in Character Animator can now be copied and pasted into After Effects as keyframes.

Rigging and UI Enhancements

Rigging a puppet with independent parts is now streamlined with automatic attachment of independent groups to their parents (e.g., arms, legs, or other parts that overlap a torso). For newly imported artwork, position the group’s origin to where you expect it to attach — no more manual stapling or extra staple handles. New visualizations in the Puppet panel show how independent groups attach to their parent group’s mesh, which now includes a yellow outline to indicate the selected layer in the Puppet panel. Clipping masks let you use the content of a layer to mask the layers above it.

To learn more about all the new features in our Fall 2017 release of Character Animator, check back for deep-dive blogs that are planned in the coming weeks or view our IBC presentation. You can download the latest updates of the Creative Cloud applications from our website. Update your current version of Character Animator or download a trial if you are not currently a Creative Cloud member. To see new tutorials and to get started quickly, visit our CH tutorial home page. Also, don’t forget to watch the MAX keynote.

As a follow-up to his outstanding seven-week series on How to Make Great Videos, on October 27th, Jason Levine will launch three, 3-week mini-series focused on the key ways to make your fabulous videos even better: Motion Graphics, Audio, and Color. Join us live on Fridays at 9 a.m. PT on the Creative Cloud Facebook channel. These sessions will be available on-demand on both Facebook and YouTube. Sign up for each miniseries today: